Adobe Launches Lightroom for Android

Adobe's popular image editing and organizing tool Lightroom comes to Android, but you'll need a Creative Cloud subscription to use it.

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Good news for Android photographers! Adobe today released its popular image-organizing and editing program Lightroom for Android devices running Jellybean and later. To use the app, however, you'll need an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, which you can get from $10 a month (Photography package, details below).

Lightroom Mobile was already available for iPhones and iPads since June 2014, and the Android version (currently only for phones) is virtually the same as its iOS counterpart. Both apps let you edit RAW files on your phone using what Adobe calls Smart Previews, then sync the changes to the PC or Mac version of Lightroom, where the full version of the files live.

A full RAW image file typically runs about 25 to 30MB: It wouldn't take many to swamp your phone's storage. So Adobe's mobile Lightroom uses smaller preview images that save space and allow a faster editing experience.

With the Lightroom Mobile app, you can organize your images by flagging or starring, and tweak settings such as brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks and color temperature. You can also apply presets, which are a group of actions (such as any combination of the previously mentioned settings) bundled together for a one-touch fix.

After you're done editing your pictures, you can share them to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks through the app. The preview images are plenty large enough for that.

At this point, Lightroom Mobile for Android is not optimized for tablets. You can certainly download it to your Android slate, but what you'll find is a stretched-out version of the phone app. Adobe says it's working on supporting tablets, but does not have a time frame on when that will happen.

The Photography plan includes the Lightroom app, Lightroom desktop and Photoshop CC. You can